Below are stories from past issues of Columban Mission magazine. The Columban Fathers publish Columban Mission magazine eight times a year. Subscriptions are available for just $15 per year. Sign up to receive our next issue. Read more about Columban Mission magazine.
Chile is very far from my native land, with different people, language, culture, climate and food. It is a Catholic country which is very abundant in resources. During my Mission Sending Mass last year, our parish priest asked me why I was going to Chile for mission then.
Columban missionary Fr. Tanvir O’Hanlon invited me to work with the Columbans for the promotion of mission in our local church.
The Ladies Ancient Order of Hibernians is a Sisterhood of Irish and Irish-American, Catholic Women.
I started to write these two poems last year during a workshop training on poetry writing in my ministry with asylum seekers.
Ethnic Indian people are traditionally obsessed with matters of pollution and purity. Purity is a central value in the culture. The caste system in India is based on this.
In my early days as a missionary in Fiji, I worked mainly among the Hindu Indo-Fijians around the town of Labasa. I was often invited by head teachers of primary schools to explain to their students the meaning of Good Friday and Easter Monday, since both were public holidays.
When I was sixteen years old, my father was diagnosed with cancer and died ten weeks later. Soon afterwards, I dropped out of high school to manage the family farm in order to support my mother and four younger siblings.
I remember how I silently uttered a prayer to bless me in my desire to become a missionary when Pope John Paul II visited the Philippines in 1985. Years later when I watched a movie about Mother Theresa's life I started to feel remiss about something.
Ana Flores Huaman is a Columban lay missionary with nearly eight years of experience, and this is her story. I first knew Ana when she was accepted into the Columban lay mission sending program in Lima, Peru, in 2007.
Shwe Mya was a dignified 40-year-old mother of two children. Her oldest son had been sent to a Buddhist monastery when he was six years old because Shwe Mya was too poor to feed him. The younger daughter lived with her grandmother whose village was very far away from Myitkyina.
The Columbans are a society of missionaries, including priests and lay people, who minister to people of various cultures as a way of witnessing to the universal love of God.